My work focuses on tracking your emotional experience to help you achieve greater emotional awareness and mastery. I am explicitly affirming and validating, actively noticing growth-oriented intentions within behavior. Not a “blank screen,” I am emotionally engaged and self-disclosing of how I am touched, moved by your emotional experiences. I will let you know what I’m thinking and feeling as it relates to how I am thinking through, making sense of, processing, or being impacted by your internal experience. My clients report growing in self awareness of their own emotional states and less emotional reactivity to current situations as unprocessed old negative memories are processed through in the therapy space. My clients become more aware and report greater control and mastery over their triggered responses based upon their histories of adverse or negative earlier experiences. My clients grow in self-compassion, care and curiosity toward their present day selves and their younger selves, their vulnerabilities and ways they learned to protect themselves that were a matter of survival in the past but may currently not be serving them so adaptively. That increased compassion and care oftentimes extends outwards toward others as well.

I take an integrative approach to individual psychotherapy, informed by therapy traditions that are experiential,   somatic and body-based, and firmly grounded in research and knowledge on trauma processes, emotion theory, attachment theory, neuroscience, developmental theory, and contemporary relational and interpersonal psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories. Therapy approaches in which I have advanced specialized training include Internal Family Systems (IFS), Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. I have specialized training in trauma/PTSD treatment and work with BIPOC populations. I specialize in work with clients who have long-standing emotional and relational difficulties, usually given histories of relational trauma, such as abuse, neglect, or chronic misattunement in families of origin.

My approach to couples therapy is informed primarily by Emotionally Focused Therapy For Couples, in addition to the Gottman Method for Couples Therapy, Developmental Model for Couples (which integrates theories of attachment, differentiation, and neuroscience), and Relational and Intersubjectivity Theories from the psychoanalytic traditions. I also weave in as needed individual psychotherapy approaches in the context of couple’s therapy, attending to both individuals and their specific histories while attending to the couple’s relationship.